A Missional Denomination is an Impossibility

Posted on November 28, 2006 by travjohnson
In a previous post , I shared that I was in Pursuit of a Missional Denomination. I actually meant that I wanted to see the Church of God become missional in its appropriation of trust and resources. However, thanks to Art Rogers at the 12 Witnesses blog,
I have found a new expression that may more accurately reflect my heart
for missionality- A Missional Denomination is an Impossibility. Art via his blog also introduced me to a denominational change model (pdf download) to learn from.
Ive had a personal conversation with our Presiding Bishop, Dennis McGuire concerning the next General Assembly. I heard a passion from him to make the Church of God a denomination that offered real services to its pastors. While it sounds totally attractive to me to hear of the potential to have health insurance provided for the pastors, property insurance provided for the churches, more services from our corporate offices on both the state and international levels, and missions money better distributed by the denomination, I think it also may cause us to be even more bureaucratic, more centralized, slower, and less field focused. I dont question the aims of our current direction. But, the times are rapidly changing and now more than ever, we need to be nimble, responsive, and missional.
Id like to offer the approach that the Tulsa Metro Association of Baptist Churches has taken. They have divested themselves of all non-core functions such as their campground, a clothing center, crises pregnancy center, etc., turning them over to churches within the association that have a passion for those ministries. This resulted in a significant downsizing of association staff. They subsequently reorganized the association into 4 divisions: Church Planting Team, the Church Strengthening Team, the Church Leadership Development Team, and the Church Staff Support Team.
According to Charles Cruce, Director of Missions for the Association, he has come to understand that the association is not:
1. a church
2. in the ministry business
The TMABC will not:
1. TMABC will not usurp and take up the role of the church!
2. TMABC will not promote and protect its own existence!
3. TMABC will not discriminate in resourcing the ministry vision of the churches!
The temptation in any organization, especially as it matures is to protect the existence of bureaucracy. It is a temptation that must be beaten in order to ensure the vitality of the mission. I feel we can make some basic changes to our structure that would radically alter our direction.
At a time when we are closing more churches in the USA than we are opening, I think the time has come to do as Charles Cruces has done and shed the bureaucracy in favor of mission. If not, we can resign ourselves to the wisdom of General Eric Shinseki when he said, If you dont like change, youre going to like irrelevance even less.
Filed under: church of god, missional church | 2 Comments »